Remembering Don Draper
by Melville22000
Summary: October, 1996. An obituary/remembrance of Don Draper as it might appear in Advertising Age.


Advertising Age, October 8, 1996

 **Remembering Don Draper**

 _Even after revealing his life's greatest secret, Madison Avenue's enigmatic prince remained a mystery to the end_

It's a tradition on Broadway that when one of its greatest stars dies, every theater lowers its lights before that night's performance. If Madison Avenue had the same tradition, ad agencies across Manhattan would have dimmed their lights last week at the death of Donald Draper. The legendary creative director's most famous ad was 1971's "I'd like to teach the world to sing" campaign for Coke, but he became known to the public at large six years later when he confessed to an amazing masquerade in which he'd lived most of his adult life under another man's identity.

As he recounted in a 1977 magazine article, Draper was born Dick Whitman in 1926 to a prostitute who died giving birth to him, and raised as an unwanted child by his father and stepmother, first in the grinding poverty of a Depression farm, then in a brothel. He joined the army and found himself stationed at an isolated outpost in Korea with only one other soldier. Their position came under fire and the other man, named Don Draper, was killed. Desperate to escape the war and the dead-end life that he came from, Whitman exchanged dog tags with the dead man and returned to the U.S with a new identity.

Even in the non-computerized 1950's, carrying off the transition wasn't easy, especially when the real Draper's wife Anna tracked him down. But instead of exposing him, she allowed him to continue the impersonation, even helping him and becoming his friend. "Anna," Draper wrote, "was the kindest, best person I ever knew. If it hadn't been for her I might have lost any belief in the goodness of human beings."

Working for a New York City furrier by day and studying at night, Draper turned a chance meeting with Roger Sterling into a job with Sterling Cooper, where he made a swift stunning rise to become the most celebrated creative director on Madison Avenue by the end of the 50's. "He was only 8 years older than me when I first met him," remembers Peter D. Campbell, "but he was already a legend in the business." Campbell, now CEO of LearJets Inc, was an account executive, and later partner, at Sterling Cooper in the 60's. "'Just get me in the room with him' he would tell us. And I saw him succeed time and time again. And it wouldn't have to be an ornate presentation. You could sit through a long meeting full of people and he would utter maybe three sentences. But afterwards those three sentences would be all that anyone would remember."

Campbell wasn't completely surprised by Draper's later revelations. "I knew there was something in his past, something he wanted kept there. Old Bert Cooper knew it, too, maybe all of it, I don't know. It didn't matter to him, so I decided it didn't matter to me."

"He was always a mystery," says Joan Harris, once a secretary at Sterling Cooper who rose to become a partner. Now an independent film producer, she knew Draper from his first day at SC. ""One of the office jokes was that he could be Batman for all we knew. That's how little he revealed of himself. When you put up that perfect of a façade, you have to wonder what's behind it."

And what did she think was behind it? "Unhappiness. He went through 2 bad marriages [his first wife, Elizabeth, mother of his 3 children, divorced him in 1963. She died in 1971. His second wife, actress Megan Calvet, divorced him in 1970]. Not that he wasn't as much at fault. He drank too much and screwed around too much. But we all did back then." Was the pressure of keeping his secret the cause? She hesitates and considers. "Maybe. But whatever it was, he was always an unhappy man."

Ironically, it was when he was at perhaps his lowest point that he would gain the inspiration for what would turn out to be his greatest success. By the autumn of 1970, he wrote, he was "in misery. My second marriage was over, my business had been taken away from me, my children felt like strangers, and I had just discovered my first wife was dying." Driving near-aimlessly cross-country, he arrived in California at the home of Anna Draper's niece, Stephanie Horton. "Anna had died a few years earlier," she recalls, "and I was his last connection to her, I guess the closest thing he could think of as family. He was in bad shape, though he tried to act as if he wasn't. I was doing none too well myself then, so I took him to this new thing at Big Sur I'd heard about, the Esalen Institute." She left after only a few days, but Draper remained.

He never spoke specifically of what he went through there, but he returned to his old life with a changed attitude. "All those people, all trying to make contact with something larger, with each other," he said. "That's what stayed with me." That idea would grow into the famous Coke ad, with people of all nations singing together "in perfect harmony."

The worldwide success of the ad gave new luster to Draper's reputation, but he wouldn't stay at McCann-Ericson much longer. When his contract expired in 1973 he went off on his own, hiring himself out as a consultant. His financial security and reputation enabled him to work only on jobs he wanted to, and would lead to his great public confession. In 1975 he was contacted by representatives of a long-shot presidential aspirant, Jimmy Carter, who asked if he would lend his expertise to their campaign.

When Carter took office, his first act was to grant an amnesty to all those who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War, which set Draper to thinking. His service during the campaign gained him a private meeting with the president ("Just get me in a room with him."), whom he trusted with his entire story. Carter granted him a full presidential pardon, even telling him that it needn't affect his public reputation, since the pardon would be listed officially as being for Dick Whitman. But Draper insisted his story be made public. As he wrote in his published confession, "A secret pardon would just continue 25 years of shame and hiding. I had to stop running."

There were some attacks on him (and Carter), since he was not a draft dodger, but technically a deserter from the US Army. But others rallied to him, including his clients, and he resumed his work from his office in California, where he had relocated after leaving M-E. "He felt better in California," says Stephanie Horton, who became his close companion in his years there. "I think he felt he could be more himself there. And his New York clients thought so much of him that they got used to working with him over the phone and fax."

Perhaps the most loyal of those clients was the one who spoke at his funeral: Margaret Olson Rizzo, co-founder of the Olson Rizzo agency, an advertising world figure almost as celebrated as Draper. Among the first women to be president and creative head of her own agency, she delivered an emotional eulogy last week, calling him "the person who changed my life completely." Interviewed in her office the next day, she was no less passionate about her first boss and mentor.

"I honestly don't know what my life would have been like if I hadn't met him. There I was, 20 years old, straight out of secretarial school, my first job, and I was assigned to him. He saw something in me, made me a copywriter, and after that … "She pauses. " Everything I know about this job, everything I do now, is something he taught me or something I saw him do first."

And their personal relationship? "We didn't talk about personal things. Almost never. But we went through things together, intense things … He had his demons, as my mother would say, but we were friends. I knew him. At least, I knew him as well as he let himself be known."

Did he ever seek help for those demons? "He tried therapy, more than once," says Stephanie Horton, "but it frustrated him. He liked to quote whoever it was that said 'Freud can tell you why you keep doing what you do, but not how to stop.' The happiest I ever saw him away from work was when he discovered a group of guys who spent their spare time fixing up classic cars. He would go down there and enjoy every second. But sometimes things would get to be too much for him and he would have to go off on one of his drives. He would get in his car and go off by himself, traveling cross-country for days, sometimes weeks at a time."

"Sometimes I couldn't get in touch with him," says Rizzo, "and I would call Stephanie or his daughter and they'd just say 'Oh, he's off on one of his trips,' and I would know. It's something he'd always done before and he couldn't stop. He just had to get away." From what? "Like I said, the demons. Or himself. He could never get away from that, but he tried. We didn't worry, though. We knew he always came back."

How, then, will the people who knew him the longest remember him? "He wasn't the easiest man to deal with," says Peter Campbell. "There was a time I knew he didn't like me any more than I liked him. But there were times later that he made me feel like family. I'll remember that."

"He could be selfish and unthinking," says Joan Harris, "like that line from, I think, Citizen Kane, where they say he wasn't brutal, even if he did brutal things? But I know from personal experience that he was a man with a sense of personal honor, of knowing and doing what was decent. I know that for a fact."

"He always called me Peggy," says Margaret Rizzo with a smile. "Except for my husband and immediate family, there's almost no one left who still calls me Peggy. He even said to me when we started this agency 'I'm going to have to start calling you Mrs. Rizzo. Or Margaret. You can't have a company where anyone calls the president Peggy.' But he still always called me Peggy."

She smiles again, wistfully. "I'm going to miss that."


End file.
